History is an Uneven Playing Field

History is an uneven playing field, riddled with absences, misdemeanours, and the vast, gaping voids characteristic of narratives that centre on spoils. As writers and artists, we’re on the hunt, chasing after the discreet omissions, the spare silences, trying to spot a clue. Those excluded from the archive – those displaced, erased, and those still alive despite – must contend with a vexed starting point: their histories were not just overlooked, but scraped away. What remains must be conjured, remembered, pieced together from whatever fragments survive. This may be a fraught exercise, often on the verge of misfire, but it is also deeply radical in its undertaking. In order to rewrite the historical telling, some of us must enter the archive’s materials and recombine them in ways it did not intend. We must plunder what was stolen, and try to polish it back to life.

We pore over what we have inherited, not just the artefacts but also what’s in their margins: the too-neat captions, the buried contact sheets. We try to hold what claims to be evidence up to the light, and scrutinise. Photographs are inherently unstable witnesses, even if the lens is finely controlled. Too many factors shape them: the narrative intention of the taker, the conditions of light. The minute articulations of what’s visible in the image, especially if there are people present: a passing glance, an upturned mouth betraying the beginnings of a smirk, a slight but telling crease in the face. The thrill of the archive is in what’s yet left to be deciphered; the archive maintains its allure because it’s so direly in need of reshaping. The photographs buried within it offer intricate, even if sometimes minute, portals. An errant hand in a frame, an unknown face with a recognisable likeness. That discernible, yet still somewhat intangible, ghostly impression of kin. In truth, we seek ourselves as much as we seek history.

The artist and photographer Tarrah Krajnak was born in 1979 in Lima. That same year, Peru began an uncertain emergence from military rule, simultaneously edging toward the internal armed conflict that would characterise its history for decades to come. To hold these two episodes together – a birth and a nation’s unrest – is to see that history is innately personal, and that it may not be so easily separated from the narrative arc of an individual life. Krajnak moved to the United States shortly after, to live with an adopted family in a mining town in Pennsylvania. "I’m a transracial adoptee in an Indigenous body," she says in an interview with After Image from 2023, "I’m untethered.… I’ve been unravelling that over the last ten years through archival research."¹

And so Krajnak journeyed back to 1979, in an attempt to reconstruct its contours. She looked through Peruvian newspapers and magazines from that year, only to find a jarring dissonance between image and word. Faces, places, and events in the photographs often bore little resemblance to the stories they were meant to illustrate. Reports of violence against women, exploitation, forced migration, and political upheaval were paired with a roster of recycled and interchangeable images. The photographs were reduced to illustrative – even if inharmonious –props. Krajnak took on the challenge, inserting her own body, quite literally, between the slim interstice of what was shown, and what had been intentionally bewildered.

History remains uneven; the archive still favours the taker. Artists like Krajnak do not fill the gaps or correct the record. They simply maintain proximity to them, to that which is painful, often uncanny, and otherwise unresolved. She lets the light pass through what was made interchangeable and onto her own skin, and what comes out of it is not truth exactly, neither is it impression, it’s perhaps a proof of a more ambiguous kind: that the scraped-away can be gathered, that the taken can be taken back, that a woman born in Lima in 1979 can return to that year without arriving there and make from its debris a history that presses itself into today, and into the future.

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¹ Tarrah Krajnak, quoted in 'I Promised I’d Return Soon' by Marcus Civin, Afterimage (2023) 50 (3): pp.27–37.